Chess Billionaires
Many people do not know it, but a lot of wealth in Silicon Valley is built by very strong chess players, which is not surprising. Paul Allen is an avid chess player and co-founder of Microsoft together with another chess player, Bill Gates (whom I featured previously to be worth $56 billion) and estimated by Forbes to be worth $28 billion. Microsoft is in the limelight lately with an offer to buyout Yahoo for $41.7 billion. He plays regular chess with his college roommate, Bert Kolde, the chief operating officer of Digeo. Lawrence Elison is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle, a major enterprise software company. His net worth is estimated at $26 billion. Oracle is the world’s second largest software company after Microsoft. He used to play tournament chess and says he puts a lot of time on his game. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar was fascinated by chess and spent some time studying the game . One of the first web-based programs he wrote was chess-by-mail service. Ebay is an online auction and shopping website where people can buy and sell goods and services worldwide. Pestaño: Chess-playing IT billionaires I was in the IT line and I didn’t even know that. Those are some of the biggest names in the IT industry. So this is another plus point to sell chess to newcomers - especially to parents. 
He has investments in Vulcan Inc., Charter Communications, Digeo etc. and owns the Portland Trailblazers of the NBA.
Roelof Botha is a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital focusing on services and software investments. Prior to that, he was chief financial officer of PayPal (e-bay) and funded YouTube before it was sold to Google for $1.65 billion. He also sits on the board of Meebo and Xoom. He plays master level chess.
Peter Andreas Thiel is a hedge fund manager, and venture capitalist. With Max Levchin, he co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund with nearly $3 billion under management.He also sits on the company’s Board of Directors of Facebook. He was at one time a promising chess player.
Michel Birch is co-founder and chief CEO of the mega social network Bebo. He hosts the “Chess 2.0” Silicon Valley Chess Club at the Bebo office in San Francisco. Bebo, like MySpace, provides its more than 23 million users with a kind of prosthetic personality extension: a profile page where they can post diary entries, photographs, music, homemade video etc.
By Frank “Boy” Pestaño
Chessmoso
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